I’ve spent 127 hours playing the brilliant new game on Steam, but the ending is a joke

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The strategy game Millennia was released on Steam on March 26th. MeinMMO author Schuhmann has already played countless games with the 4x game and is thrilled. But he also says: With all my love, the ending is a joke. After 10 hours of world conquest there is a tired screen. Seriously?

What kind of game is this?

  • Millennia is something like Civilization, but you can only own and directly control a limited number of cities, maybe six to eight. However, these cities can cover a huge area and continue to grow even after many hours of play.
  • Therefore, it is important where you position the cities and that you have enough space to expand them over the course of 6,000 years.
  • Different eras that sometimes appear and sometimes don’t provide variety in the game. In places you get skills that you have always wanted in strategy games: you can build sandbanks where there is otherwise only water, or level mountains. Previously useless areas suddenly become valuable after thousands of years.

    • Announcement teaser trailer for Millennia

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    Millennia has a great learning curve and brilliant ideas

    Why do I like the game so much? I was captivated by Millennia right from the start and the fascination has increased over the last 3 weeks the more I understand the game.

    Because there is no civilization, not even close, but a city building simulation, where you have to eliminate the neighboring peoples or at least exclude them from your own areas so that their villages do not ruin your own plans for huge metropolises that stretch across entire continents.

    Millennia has an incredibly satisfying learning curve and is coherent. It even has pleasant surprises in store. In every age, new problems await the player: citizens constantly want more, first food and houses, then sanitation, electricity, a religion and ultimately even access to the Internet.

    It’s worth thinking logically and building a production chain: cities have natural tendencies to grow in one direction or the other due to the environment in which they are located. Where there is a lot of forest, you can cut down the forest and make paper from it. Perhaps the religious or intellectual center of an empire will emerge here. A mining town can mine ore, perhaps becoming the Ruhr area of ​​its own empire.

    Normal strategies from other games, such as uninhibited growth or unscrupulous conquest, bring with them some pitfalls, because if you grow too quickly, you arouse desires among the people that you cannot fulfill. Anyone who conquers too much without securing anything will quickly find themselves with a revolution on their hands.

    Whenever you neglect one aspect of the game, it comes along and bites you in the butt.

    That gives me the kick: Despite mediocre Steam reviews, I really like Millennia because I accept the game’s limitations:

  • Millennia would be much easier if you could simply tear down conquered enemy cities to make room for your own cities – but that’s not possible, you have to build around the enemy’s existing cities
  • Millennia would also be much easier if you could take all the conquered cities and run them yourself – but that’s not possible either, you’re limited to a relatively few cities

    • This is criticized in the reviews on Steam, and it annoyed me at first, but I’ve now accepted them as necessary limitations of the game. They are what make Millennia so attractive.

    Complaining about this is like being annoyed that the pawn in chess can only capture opposing pieces diagonally and cannot simply remove pieces that are in front of it.

    There is nothing more at the end – go back to the main menu and restart.

    How do the games end? This is the point that, with the best will in the world, I cannot forgive Millennia.

    There are several ways to end a game. After 127 hours with the Steam version, I have now found two of the standard endings, either you lead your people to transcendence, which is pretty easy, or you laboriously put together a colony ship to Mars before the evil Germans can do it.

    But no matter how you finish the game, after an epic game of 10 hours, you get a single plain victory screen with the message “You won” without any stats, fanfare, videos or anything.

    And then you go back to the main menu, where you have to start the next game, as the game tells you.

    Anyone who thinks that something great awaits the player with “View Map” will be disappointed. All you can do is scroll over the map ineffectively and almost as if in slow motion and admire the weak point of the game, the graphics.

    For every way to win, there is a success.

    With all the love and charm I get from the unpolished and unfinished game mechanics, the few hours of work to give Millennia a halfway decent ending really should have been there.

    So even I, who have a positive attitude towards the game, suspect that Millennia should have remained in development for another six months or more.

    You can read my impression of Millennia after the first few days here:

    I’m obsessed with a new game on Steam: I’ve already sunk 40 hours in 4 days

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